Super Bowl Squares, Explained

A brief explainer of the popular Super Bowl gambling game.

If you're inclined to gamble during this year's Super Bowl between the 49ers and Chiefs, there's no shortage of methods, from point spreads to prop bets. One popular way is to participate in Super Bowl squares. 

Ahead of Super Bowl LIV kickoff from Hard Rock Stadium in South Florida, learn how the game works. 

Format:

The setup for Super Bowl squares is simple. A pool consists of 10 vertical columns and 10 horizontal rows thatched together and numbered from zero to nine. 

One Super Bowl team—in this year's case either the Chiefs or 49ers—gets the columns and the other gets the rows. Each of the 100 squares inside are purchased individually. 

Each square is priced equally. The members of your respective Super Bowl party can then buy as many squares as they'd like in each quarter. The more squares that are bought, the greater the payout for the winner.

The numbers assigned to each row and column are selected at random once every box of the pool has been sold.

How to win:

At the end of every quarter, the person whose square corresponds with the intersection of the second digit of each team’s score wins a prize (for example, a 14–7 score at the end of the first quarter pays out the owner of the square at row 4, column 7). Often, if a square is unowned, you can roll over the money to the next quarter.

The final score usually pays out the highest sum.

Super Bowl squares are often a fun game to play amongst peers. But as The MMQB's Conor Orr reported in a recent feature, it also was the centerpiece of one of the strangest kidnapping cases Western New York had ever see.

There is also a deep end of the pool.